Optically Controlled MIS Microstrip Phase Shifter Avanish Bhadauria1, Raghvendra Singh Tomar2 and Enakshi Khular Sharma2

Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute (CEERI ) (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. India) Pilani(Rajasthan)-333031, India Department of Electronic Science University of Delhi South Campus New Delhi-110021,India
2

Abstract
The past two decades have witnessed the merging of optics and microwave electronics forming a new area of research now called microwave photonics. Photonics brings new functions to microwave systems such as long delay lines, frequency conversion, and control of microwave devices. The basic process in direct optical control of microwave semiconductor devices is photo- excitation of carriers (electron-hole pairs) in semiconductor. When photon energy is greater than the bandgap of semiconductor, electron-hole plasma is created due to light absorption. The photo-induced plasma gives rise to complex dielectric constant in semiconductor and changes both the real and imaginary part of complex dielectric constant. This change in dielectric constant has an effect of the various characteristics of the devices and can be used for direct optical control. Optical power was chosen as the controlling mechanism over the conventional electronic control because of following advantages: 1. Almost perfect isolation between controlling and controlled devices. 2. Ultra-fast response 3. High power handing capability 4. Rapid advances in laser diode technology leads to a possibility of integrating the optically controlled devices in microwave monolithic integrated circuits (MMICs). In this paper we present an optically controlled MIS line phase shifter based on slow wave phenomenon. We have studied the propagation behavior of MIS line under optical illumination and found that the proposed structure can be used as an optically controlled phase shifter. The normalized propagation constant at a given frequency strongly depends on optical illumination, especially in the dielectric region; hence, the phase shift introduced after propagation through a given length of the line can be controlled optically and hence the desired phase shift can be controlled by optical illumination. For our analysis we have chosen the typical MIS microstrip slow-wave line on silicon substrate with a silicon substrate of thickness h2 = 190m with an insulating (SiO2) layer of thickness h1=0.3m and dielectric constant 1=4.5.

Figure.

Optically controlled microstrip MIS Phase shifter

References
[1]A. Bhadauria, E. K. Sharma and A. K. Verma, Equivalent Transmission Line Model for Optically Controlled Miscrostrip Slow Wave Structures, Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, vol. 31, No. 4 (2001). [2] A. Bhadauria, E. K. Sharma and A. K. Verma, Pulse propagation in optically controlled MIS slow wave structure, Proc. of SPIE vol. 5357, (2004).